fleeb and aahz are correct. The various pieces of citadel.org, including
Uncensored, moved out of my house in 2007 and into a real data center with
big UPS's and air conditioning and security and big redundant internet pipes
and people who walk around opening trouble tickets if they see red or yellow
lights on equipment. There used to be a phantom creeping around messing things
up but he left the premises in 2012 along with his favorite human.

I really did get a lot of satisfaction from running what amounted to a self-hosting
operation out of my basement, but it's also nice not having to worry about
it. At one point, if my home network had a problem, it took out www.citadel.org,
Uncensored, my phones, the automation controls in my house, and a bunch of
other stuff.

A couple of years ago I decided I'd gotten the Asterisk bug out of my system
and switched back to regular phones,
so that's not a concern anymore either. I may or may not do the automation
thing in the new house. Haven't decided yet.

I don't even use my home server as an Internet gateway anymore. I am using
(gasp!) an ordinary home router.

okay, sanity check question. Have any of you encountered wifi devices that
fail over time. The thing stays in the same location, but after an hour or
two of use the signal seems to get lower and eventually loses connection.
If I power down the device or switch off the wireless connection and switch
it back on again a few minutes later it's back in business for awhile. I've
seen this happen with a) a usb wifi adapter b) my acer 710 chromebook and
c) a nook tablet. Maybe it's heat? Maybe my imagination? Ever see anything
like this?

Other devices on the same network ( my thinkpad, another identical model/brand
usb dongle to the first ) can run for hours without issue. The working usb
dongle has been running for 175 days without issue for instance ( it's connected
to a raspberri pi acting as a bridge and mame box[D[D[D[D[D[D[D[D[D[D[D[D[D[D[D[C[C[C[C[C[C[C[C[C[C[C[C[C[C[C
).

My network is [cable modem] <--> linux box router
The linux box router has three NICs. One for the cable modem, one for the
internal LAN, and one for the wifi lan. The wifi lan is just a netgear wireless
router. The wifi lan can only see the internet and the linux box router. Clients
on the wifi lan can VPN to the linux box router and from there see the internal
LAN, but that's it.

It's possible it's the netgear, but it seems client specific. As in, if my
tablet starts failing I can pick up the chromebook and it's fine (or vice
versa) but both of them exhibit weird drop off if I've been using them for
a few hours (vs. my thinkpad, which I never see the issue with, or the usb
wifi adapter attached to the raspberri pi, currently up for the 176 days now
... ).

Having spent the last 13+ years in a primarily Cisco powered data center,
I can attest to that. At least for their primary lines of switching/routing
gear. Some of the periphery stuff like load balancers can be tempremental.

My network is [cable modem] <--> linux box router The linux box router has three NICs. One for the cable modem, one for the internal LAN, and one for the wifi lan. The wifi lan is just a netgear wireless router. The wifi lan can only see the internet and the linux box router. Clients on the wifi lan can VPN to the linux box router and from there see the internal LAN, but that's it.

It's possible it's the netgear, but it seems client specific. As in, if my tablet starts failing I can pick up the chromebook and it's fine (or vice versa) but both of them exhibit weird drop off if I've been using them for a few hours (vs. my thinkpad, which I never see the issue with, or the usb wifi adapter attached to the raspberri pi, currently up for the 176 days now ... ).

Drop out or unplug sections to diagnose. If you can unplug parts of the network to rule out devices, all the better. If you can vie the traffic going out, it would make sence to view that, but if not, block as you can via limited segments and find what is eating all the bandwidth.

I ordered a new wifi access point. It should show up toward the end of this
week. I'm still sceptical that the AP is the problem, but as I was mentioning
all this to my wife she said "My macbook pro drops off the wireless network
all the time. When it does I just go clean the kitchen..." Isn't that the
picture of domesticity. So we have an android tablet, a chromebook, and a
macbook pro all exhibiting the same odd wireless drops. I figured the raspberry
pi being up for so long ruled that out, but the pi is just maintaining a VPN
link. I only actually use the bandwidth there a few hours a day. Plus it's
probably 15 feet away from the AP (through the floor). Ah well. $50 for a
dd-wrt compatible AP and it got generally positive reviews.

Anyway, MBP and wifes are a hazard to cheaper APs. We had a (cheap) Fritzbox here as plain AP for a while.* Apple laptops would make it throw fits. Half an hour of internet video safari on youtube and it would overheat and had to be restarted manually. The connected printer would not work either. I bought a used Airport AP, all is calm now and the printer has never lost a print job, nor had the AP to be restarted, no matter what load the thing gets.

*Fritzbox in the higher price segment are a real workhorses and they do not go down easily.

Some internet providers want you to use "their" router. Verizon FiOS for
example uses MoCA to get the set top boxes to talk to the network over coaxial
cable. You can put their router behind your router but you lose certain functionality
such as on-screen caller ID and remote DVR programming. It's kind of annoying.

Still trying to decide how I want to lay out my network in the new house
(hopefully moving in the next week or two). It's a bigger space, but unlike
the Mouse House it doesn't have wire lath in the walls acting like a Faraday
cage. One AP might be enough if it's located carefully.

One thing I can say from experience (not at home unfortunately) is that the
Cisco "Aironet" AP's are fabulous in terms of coverage and range. Nowadays
you can pick them up cheap on eBay.

Some providers even force you to use their boxen, those bastards. They do not tell you the VOIP settings, which are hardwired to the box. Somehow they can autoconfigure those remotely, but you have to enter the dsl settings manually. Once a year, these boxes reset themselves, suddenly, without a reason.

That famous phone call that someone posted to the internet prompted this
article, where The Verge has contacted a number of Comcast employees to hear
about what is going on internally. It's... it's a fucking nightmare.

Never before have I wanted to move away from Comcast so desparately, but
I can't until Verizon gets fibre to my neighborhood (which probably isn't
going to happen).

Verizon indicated this past Spring that they're going to spend the next couple
of years building up market share in existing service areas rather than expanding
into new service areas. For customers out of the service area they are pushing
some new sort of wireless router with a 4G uplink, and WiFi+Ethernet+POTS
downlinks. Seems a little dicey considering it eats up your data cap and
depends on having a strong signal available.